


On a Lea Shore

by pendrecarc



Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: Gen, Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-01
Updated: 2019-01-01
Packaged: 2019-10-01 14:40:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,166
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17246018
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pendrecarc/pseuds/pendrecarc
Summary: The second morning after Christmas, the Folly is presented with a trivial problem and a curious waterfowl.





	On a Lea Shore

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Aurae](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aurae/gifts).



The morning after Boxing Day, I came downstairs to hear Nightingale laughing and nearly tripped over my own feet.

You'd think I'd have been used to that sound by then. I heard it often enough, and caused it a sizable minority of the time--I'd like to think because of my scintillating wit, but I'm not that delusional. But I’d been working all hours the night before, and I hadn’t had time to get my guard up yet, so it surprised me.

I followed the sound into the breakfast room and was greeted by Nightingale himself smiling over the rim of his teacup and, across the table, the back of a white woman's head. Her hair was twisted up in an elegant knot, and it was so light I couldn't tell if it was blond or grey. I might have recognized her from that, but it was the pale turquoise cardigan and the strand of pearls sitting above the neckline that told me, a half second before she turned around, that I was in the presence of the River Lea.

"Peter," said Nightingale. "We have a guest."

She set her cup down and nodded at me. "Constable. Not an early riser, are you?"

I rose a bit earlier when I hadn’t just been on an all-night shift, but defensiveness is the wrong way to start any interview with a river. "Ma'am," was all I said, hoping both that my voice wasn't too crusty with sleep and that Molly had some strong coffee ready.

Nightingale, who could have come to my defense himself but generally prefers to sit back and watch me flounder my way through these situations, gestured toward the chair between them. "Lea has brought us a problem."

"A matter for the police?" I'd have expected that to be routed through Tyburn, if it was serious, but then Lea didn't look overly concerned.

"Problem might be overstating it," she said. She indicated the enormous leather handbag that was sitting on the linen tablecloth between platters of bacon and toast. “I would call it a puzzle.”

I looked to Nightingale, but he was clearly expecting me to make the next move. I really needed that coffee. I sat down and leaned over to look into the purse, then sat back so quickly I nearly took a plate of iced cakes with me. “What is that?”

“A Canada goose,” Lea said. She started spooning Molly’s best blackberry preserves onto a piece of toast, apparently unconcerned with the extremely damp, extremely dead waterfowl taking up every available cubic centimeter of a bag that probably cost as much as my annual salary. “A very small one.”

I didn’t know what size Canada geese usually ran, but it didn’t look particularly small to me. “And you want us to investigate a rash of goose-killings?”

“Goodness, no,” said Lea. “I had to kill it myself. To get this out.” She reached into the outer pocket of the bag and retrieved a small, old-fashioned coin purse, then unsnapped the kiss-lock and handed it to me. I took it with more than a little trepidation. I didn't see anything living or dead inside, but I learn from my mistakes, so I spread my napkin over the table and upended it into that instead of into my palm. A few small items fell out: a tiny metal key, a large jet button, a delicate watch chain, and a bright blue gemstone the size of my little fingernail. “That, specifically,” Lea said, bending over the napkin to touch the gemstone. It rolled gently over the starched white fabric. “The others I found much earlier.”

“Er,” I said. “Found where?”

“Inside the gizzards of several geese,” she said, as my salvation appeared in the form of Molly carrying a gloriously large pot of coffee. “Over the course of some years, on my waters. They felt like an itch on the spine, right between the shoulder blade at just the wrong spot to reach.”

“The geese felt like an itch?”

“What they had eaten did,” said Lea. “Go on, then.”

I paused for a large gulp of coffee and gingerly reached out for the objects on the napkin. The little gemstone, first--it was cool to the touch, and then beneath that I felt a brush of something else, like coarse wool, and then a faint smell of tobacco.

“That’s the one I found today,” Lea said. “The key was two Decembers ago, near the new Aquatics Centre.” That one, being metal, had stronger traces of _vestigia_ \--the smell of dried roses and the sound of rustling leaves. “The button, in the summer of ‘05.” The taste of treacle, and a faint echo of a purring cat. “And the chain--” When I touched that, I started slightly. It was fainter than the rest, but I’d know that feeling of wet, smoky pine and tent canvas anywhere. Now I was the one with a tingle between the shoulder blades. I glanced up at Nightingale, but he showed no trace of recognition.

“So you want us to investigate a rash of goose poisonings,” I suggested, and Nightingale hid another smile behind his teacup.

“It’s an irritation, little more,” Lea said, “but an oddity. I thought you might find it of interest.”

“I don’t know if we have time right now,” I said, glancing at Nightingale. “The Folly has quite a few open cases.”

“Nothing urgent enough that we can’t oblige an honored guest,” said Nightingale. “Consider it an act of community engagement. You don’t have anything else on this morning, do you?” He knew full well I’d planned to spend the morning holed up in the tech-cave, free from Latin adverbs and HOLMES actions alike. “Take the Jag,” he added casually. “Since you’ll have a passenger.”

That did sweeten the deal. I looked up to see Molly standing in the door with a thermos. _Et tu, fae?_ “Ready when you are,” I told Lea graciously. She smiled one of those river-smiles that made her look thirty years old and thirteen hundred at the same time, and then she reached for another piece of toast.

When we left twenty minutes later, I glanced back into the breakfast room and saw Nightingale frowning down at my napkin where the watch-chain had been lying along with the rest. Lea had retrieved the items and coin purse along with her handbag, but she’d left the goose. It made an odd-looking centerpiece.

It was a cold day, but not so cold that the weather had managed to decide if we were getting snow or drizzle. Sliding behind the wheel of the Jag almost made up for the number of layers I’d had to stuff under my raincoat, but not quite. Those leather seats aren’t heated.

“Take the Blackwell Tunnel,” Lea said while I was still persuading my fingers to close on the frozen steering wheel.

“Where are we going?”

“Dunstable.”

I stared at her. She’d pulled on a long white wool coat and wound a cashmere muffler around her throat. It looked gorgeously warm and was so thick I couldn’t see the bottom half of her face. “Don’t we want the M1?” I asked, because I knew better than to say _That’s in completely the wrong direction_ to a goddess.

“The tunnel will be faster for me,” she said, settling back in her seat. I decided obedience in this case was the better part of valor, and to my surprise I found the roads clear all the way to the river, as though London traffic was rolling out the red carpet.

“Matilda built my bridge here,” Lea said in explanation as we dipped underground, moving faster than I’ve ever driven through London in daylight. “After I gave her a bit of a wetting. I was never quite clear if she did it to honor or spite me, but she did a handsome job of it, even if they did have to tear it down. But I still find the way tends to open for me.”

“Matilda?” I was trying not to get too distracted from the road. “Which Matilda was that?”

“Why, Henry’s. Of Scotland.”

“As in ‘my fair lady’? In the twelfth century?”

“You ought to know better than to comment on a lady’s age, Constable,” she said, but her tone was more friendly than severe.

Our way was more than a little roundabout, but with the unusual cooperation of the traffic we were past Luton in no time. We parked by a small town green in Houghton Regis, and Lea waited for me to trot round to the passenger’s side and open her door before leading me down a gravel path past a cricket pavilion—unsurprisingly deserted this time of year—and into a clump of weeds sheltering a little trickle of water that looked like it was seriously considering the matter of ice, but hadn’t quite committed yet. “What’s this?” I asked, hanging back while she walked straight into the weeds.

“My headwaters,” she replied. She was wearing a pair of spiky heels that ought to have sunk straight into the mud. Somehow, of course, they didn’t. “This morning’s goose was near here when I first felt it.”

“And you want me to—“

“Work out where it came from,” she said, blinking at me in surprise. “I certainly can’t be bothered.”

I shuffled a little closer. I’d put on heavy boots, but I wasn’t eager to get them wet. “How am I supposed to do that?”

She gave me an impossibly elegant shrug and kept walking out into the water, breaking through the thin crust of ice. It came sloshing up past her ankles, then her calves, brushing the hem of the spotless white coat. “I don’t know the Folly’s business, Constable. I’m sure you have your methods. But this may help.” She held out the coin purse. I girded my loins, stepped closer until the water was sloshing up past _my_ ankles—fortunately I have good boots—and retrieved it. “Compliments of the season to you and yours.” And she kept walking, until the water rose—far faster than it should have, a shallow stream like that—and swallowed her right up, pearls and twinset and all.

I sighed, stomped the life back into my feet, and started walking along the Lea.

It would have been a pleasant enough walk in summertime, but on a day like that it was misery. I slipped once or twice on the slick ground, but through stubbornness alone I managed not to drop the thermos. If I’d spilled Molly’s coffee, I probably would have cried.

I wasn’t, honestly, at all sure what I was looking for. _Vestigia_ has a limited sensory radius even at the best of times. I wondered what I’d do if I did get an odd flicker from a goose in the middle of the river—because eventually the trickle of muddy water did turn into something you might almost call that, though we were still well upstream from the official headwaters. Did Lea expect me to take a running dive after it?

But it wasn’t anything in the river that finally caught my attention, and I wasn’t called on for any ice fishing that day. Instead, as the sun rose weakly in what passed for a December afternoon, I heard the insistent honks of a small flock of geese gathered around a neat little brick house near the bank, or rather around the shed out back.

I thought about taking a look inside the shed. Nightingale certainly would have. But as far as I was aware there was no crime in progress, and he _had_ told me to consider this a community engagement exercise, so instead I stomped my way around to the front of the house, took out my warrant card, and rang the doorbell like the dutiful officer I am.

The door opened on the pleasant, wrinkled face of the smallest old white lady I’ve ever met. Her name was Mrs. Ryder, and what was a nice policeman like me doing out on a day like this? After she had refilled my thermos and I’d talked her in circles for a while without being explicit about why I was there—I’d gotten good at that in my years at the Folly—I brought the subject around to the geese.

“Oh, yes,” she said, “they’ve broken into the shed again. And I just had the door replaced.”

I took another sip of the coffee, which while weaker than Molly’s was wonderfully hot. “They do that frequently?”

“Every few years,” she said, shaking her head. “Since my Jim passed. He always made sure it was in good repair. Said it should be kept up nicely, since I spend so much of my time puttering around in there. There’s my grandson comes to do little jobs when I need it now, but I can’t be ringing him up every weekend, can I?”

“Why the shed in particular?”

“Well, that’s where the feed is,” she said. “I like to sit on my bench by the river most mornings, and they come to me. The ducks, too. But the geese are the real problem—they know where the grain is kept, and sometimes they don’t have the patience to wait for me.”

“I see,” I said—and I thought I was beginning to. “Mrs. Ryder, what else is it you keep out in that shed?”

She was willing enough to show me, once she had topped up my coffee, and after I waited for her to put on jumper and coat and scarf and boots and hat (by which time the coffee was cold again) we trundled out to the shed together so she could show me.

Aside from the large plastic tubs of grain, one of which had indeed been spilled sideways all over the floor, she had cupboards filled with little cardboard boxes (“Bulbs, dear, I’ll plant them again in the spring if my back holds up—but it always has!”), a corner reserved for Jim’s old fishing gear, and everywhere, everywhere, a positive jungle of knick-knacks. It seemed that, aside from feeding birds and stray constables, Mrs. Ryder spent her time at jumble sales. “You find the most astonishing treasures,” she told me earnestly as I bent over a cast-iron urn that was if nothing else astonishingly ugly. “I kept them in the house at first, but Jim put his foot down at last and built this place for me. He said I could clutter it as much as I liked.”

The urn bore no trace of magic, though I did have to question whether something that hideous could have been made without supernatural influence. I straightened and pulled Lea’s coin purse from my pocket. “Mrs. Ryder, do these look familiar to you?”

“Oh!” she said in pure astonishment as I held out the key, the button, the watch-chain, and the stone. “Oh goodness, wherever did you find those?” She reached out for the stone first. “This was set into the loveliest little silver necklace. I bought it just three weeks ago.”

“And put it in your shed?”

“Yes, of course—in the chest where I keep my special finds. It’s fallen over again. I suppose it’s those geese that have done it.” She made to bend down, but I leapt ahead of her, not wanting to have to pick her back up the floor again. “There, you see?”

And I did see: a small wooden chest filled to bursting with coins and tarnished jewelry, toy soldiers and odd bits of hardware, carved animals and filigreed cigarette cases. I put my hand in and it was like a hundred people were shouting at me all at once, in a dozen different languages.

I took my hand back out again.

“Mrs Ryder,” I said, with the most professionally reassuring smile I could manage, “I’m going to have to ask you a few more questions.”

When I got back to the Folly well after dark—not that that’s saying much that time of year—my feet were sore and my face was frozen, but there was a fire burning cheerfully in the library, and I hadn’t even sat down before a steaming mug was at my elbow.

“Well?” Nightingale looked up expectantly from his book.

“Well,” I said, “I’ve found us another hedge witch. She’s been going around to jumble sales and boot fairs for decades, and it seems she’s got an eye for _vestigia_.”

“Really,” Nightingale said with interest, laying the book aside entirely. “What else did she have?”

“Nothing dangerous,” I assured him—and I’d done a good bit of poking around to make sure. I explained about the geese, and he laughed, delighted. I did enjoy that sound.

“Do you think she’ll need a warning about magical consequences?” he asked, sobering.

“I made certain she’s not actually practicing. Sensitive, I think, but she hasn’t had any training, and hasn’t stumbled onto anything of her own. She just likes to collect things, and some of them are more interesting than others.”

“And how do you intend to solve Lea’s occasional goose problem?” His grey eyes danced.

“By stopping over there every few months, making certain she _hasn’t_ picked up anything dangerous, and checking the hinges of her shed door.” I drained the mug and stood. “Oh, and sir.”

“Yes?”

“Did you recognize that watch-chain?” I asked, and, off his confusion, drew it out from my pocket—along with the watch itself.

It was a beautiful hand-wound pocketwatch in silver and brass. I’d polished it off as best I could with the edge of my scarf, but I was sure Molly could do me one better. I handed it across to him, a whiff of pine in my nostrils, and the expression on his face was well worth a frigid hike up and down the banks of the Lea. “Good Lord,” he said, staring first at the watch, then up at me. “I lost this years ago. Decades. Wherever did she find it?”

“She couldn’t remember,” I said, enjoying his astonishment. “But she was happy enough to part with it once I explained. It’s yours, then?”

“No. Well, yes, but—it was my uncle’s. He left it to me.” His thumb brushed almost compulsively over the glass face. “Peter, this is—”

“It’s not an Omega,” I said, tamping down the warm flush of pleasure at the way he was looking at me. It. Definitely looking at the watch. “But, well. Happy Christmas, sir.”

“Yes,” he said vaguely. Then he pulled himself together, snapped the watch closed, and stood up. “Thank you, Peter. And now, if I’m not much mistaken, we're about to be summoned for dinner.”

It couldn’t have come at a better time. “I’ll go change,” I said, because I was nothing if not well-trained.

“Do,” he said, now in his usual crisp accents. Then he spoilt the effect by grinning at me. “I believe it is roast goose tonight.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thymesis, I hope you enjoy!
> 
> This is set an an ambiguous canon divergence-AU at least a year after the Christmas in _Whispers Underground_. Apologies to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and many thanks to "Diamond Geezer" for the photos of the walk along the River Lea--I only wish I'd been able to work in the bronze hats of Blocker's Seaside!
> 
> https://www.lutontoday.co.uk/news/w-hat-has-happened-to-blockers-seaside-1-1350490
> 
> For the history of goose disappearances on the River Lea, see below:
> 
> https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-16158610


End file.
